Righting wrongs is long in coming

Adam Serwer compares the ideological underpinnings of John Yoo's and Jay Bybee's "torture memos" to the theological justification for al Qaeda's killing of thousands of innocent -- and usually Muslim -- civilians. The whole thing is worth a sober reading, but he ends on, I think, a hopeful note.

The American conscience, when it decides to act, is mighty--but it is also sluggish and vain. Americans are crushed by the weight of not fulfilling their own high expectations--so the shameful acts of one generation are often rectified by a subsequent generation unencumbered by their own complicity in such acts. So the compromise the Founding Fathers reached on the issue of slavery, in defiance of the spirit of the documents they authored, was eventually righted by the Civil War. The slavery by another name of reconstruction was ignored by a nation weary of conflict after nearly being rent in two--but eventually gave birth to the civil rights movement. The suffragettes were forced to accept a compromise on the 14th Amendment that denied them the vote--but they would ultimately prevail. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans, Reagan gave them reparations. The American conscience is often slow to action, but not because it cannot recognize evil--but because our view of ourselves as a people guided by justice is so important to who we are that when confronted with proof of our own shortcomings, we recoil in shame and precious vanity. Eventually, with the big stuff, we usually find our way--we see this with our slow, staggering, but inevitable march towards full personhood for gays and lesbians. And while those who stained America's honor with war crimes have escaped accountability for now, these American takfiris will eventually be judged by history with a clarity we cannot muster today.

The arc of the universe is long...you know, all that stuff.